The businesses demanding the 'free' from freelancers

About 2 Weeks, 1 Day, 9 Hours, 46 Minutes ago.

"It happens all the time and not just for small things. I've been asked to work for two full weeks in exchange for the company sharing the work on social media."
Stacey MacNaught is a self-employed online marketing consultant with over a decade of experience. Yet she's still inundated with requests to work for free "for exposure".
"One agency asked me to work for free two days a month to help them keep a client.
"And if they saved the client and got a new contract, they promised to outsource the work to me - as long as I cut my day rate by 50%.
"I went through my last 12 enquiries and two of them were asking for work for free, so that's one in six."
She is not alone. As the number of people in self-employment working for themselves rises, there's also a growing concern that many are being pressured into unpaid work.
Alisa Rosenbaum used to work as an architect and says she was constantly asked to do unpaid hours: "[They] string you along, expecting work for free on the basis of 'the next big job will be yours'.
"I had a client phone up and suggest that I 'needed to do this work' for him because six months ago he paid me and didn't really need the drawing he paid me to do. So now I had to do more work for him... for free."